“Your association has taken a significant role in fostering public awareness of nuclear disarmament and has led to its advancement.”
The Author Responds
October 2024
By Frank N. von Hippel
Matthew Costlow describes protections against unauthorized launch.
That was not the subject of my article.
My article focused on the danger of authorized but mistaken launch due to the less than 10 minutes that the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launch-on-warning posture allows the president to make the launch decision, combined with the pressure that Strategic Command would put on a president to launch if it were convinced that the early-warning system had detected an actual enemy attack.1 For a sense of the challenges of such a situation, see the partially declassified documents released by the National Security Archive earlier this year relating to what was meant to have been a presidential training exercise in the launch-on-warning decision-making process, in October 1977, perhaps the only one that has ever been conducted.2
The possibility of being put in this situation has terrified presidents back to Ronald Reagan.3 The Pentagon insists on a launch-on-warning posture, but not because of the deterrence benefits that Costlow claims. If 1,000 warheads on ballistic missile submarines at sea are an insufficient deterrent, an ICBM launch-on-warning policy will not change that situation.
But every U.S. missile warhead has an assigned target, and Strategic Command has made covering all those targets, no matter how minor, a higher priority than avoiding the danger of a mistaken launch.4 The imperative of target coverage has prevailed over that of protecting civilization.
After decades of failed efforts to persuade the Pentagon to change its priorities, some of us have concluded that the only way out of this impasse is to get rid of the ICBMs. Historically, Congress has been most willing to cancel counterproductive government programs when those programs have incurred huge cost overruns and indefinitely growing delays. The U.S. ICBM replacement program has developed this syndrome and therefore is providing a rare opportunity to reduce the danger of accidental nuclear war.
ENDNOTES
1. B.G. Blair, “Loose Cannons: The President and U.S. Nuclear Posture,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 76, No. 1 (2020): p. 12-26; Jonathan Schell, The Gift of Time (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), p. 194 (interview of General George Lee Butler, commander in chief, Strategic Command) (hereinafter Butler interview).
2. “Ivory Item: Carter First U.S. President to Participate in Nuclear Drill,” National Security Archive, May 31, 2024, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2024-05-31/ivory-item-carter-first-us-president-participate-nuclear.
Frank N. von Hippel is senior research physicist and professor of public and international affairs emeritus in the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University.